Bush's 4th veto of his presidency is a good one

[ymu]

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I can't see how any sane person could argue that it makes more sense to pay $4,500/year on average for healthcare instead of $1,500/year on average extra tax. You like the idea of being sold expensive snake oil by largely unregulated salesmen? The first bank run for decades - something previously thought impossible in today's economic system - has just happened because of irresponsible lending to US consumers, and US consumers still want less regulation?

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In your system who do you suppose would do research to find new medicines. I hate repeating something that was said earlier in the thread, but I just can't believe that someone can be this oblivious to what drives research and development.

[/ QUOTE ]Firstly, I haven't advocated nationalising them. I've suggested that they shouldn't be allowed to sell obscenely expensive and largely useless poisons to an unsuspecting public.

Secondly, I'm advocating sane collective purchasing of health care instead of allowing a bunch of insurance companies in to take a massive cut of the money spent. Drug costs are also only a small proportion of spending on health, cutting them in half often doesn't make a substantial impact on the output of economic models. The US system also provides perverse incentives to doctors to over-treat, sometimes leading to worse health outcomes as a result. High dose chemotherapy for breast cancer is a good example - it took years to prove that it was shortening lives because doctors, mostly in the US, were such vociferous advocates of it. No drug company made money out of that, but the doctors did.

Finally, your faith in the fundamental goodness of a multi-billion dollar industry is touching, but what do you think the universities and public sector research bodies do? We don't need a bazillion me too drugs and armies of reps swamping medics with misleading information and billions wasted on advertising. Public sector medical research is far more valuable and a lot cheaper. The major medical journals won't even publish industry funded "research" any more unless the authors had certain contractual arrangements in place to safeguard the scientific integrity (rare to date). It's ridiculous to suggest that they don't lie, cheat and put peoples' lives at risk because they demonstrably do. That's why most countries are putting better systems in place to catch them at it and examine the true value of treatments instead of relying on information the companies stick on the advertising leaflets.

[RR]

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That's why most countries are putting better systems in place to catch them at it and examine the true value of treatments instead of relying on information the companies stick on the advertising leaflets.


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Please name a life saving drug that came from one of these companies. It is clear you still don't understand the people have to be rewarded for their work or they won't do it.

What kind of work do you do? Perhaps you need to be regulated and paid less. I am certain based on your posts above that you would work for whatever the government feels is fair rather than taking competing bids from private firms.

[BuddyQ]

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your faith in the fundamental goodness of a multi-billion dollar industry is touching, but what do you think the universities and public sector research bodies do? We don't need a bazillion me too drugs and armies of reps swamping medics with misleading information and billions wasted on advertising. Public sector medical research is far more valuable and a lot cheaper. The major medical journals won't even publish industry funded "research" any more unless the authors had certain contractual arrangements in place to safeguard the scientific integrity (rare to date). It's ridiculous to suggest that they don't lie, cheat and put peoples' lives at risk because they demonstrably do. That's why most countries are putting better systems in place to catch them at it and examine the true value of treatments instead of relying on information the companies stick on the advertising leaflets.

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Competition in a free market motivated by profit drives innovation, efficiency and discovery. (also creates wealth but that is another topic) I know European socialists frown on such things, then again you have no problem in gobbing up the latest in medical advances, mainly coming from the US.

Had medicine been always left up to the prerogative of government collectives, we would still be using leaches to cure 'the vapors.'

[tame_deuces]

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Had medicine been always left up to the prerogative of government collectives, we would still be using leaches to cure 'the vapors.'

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And if the market believed they worked, they would still be sold. Come on, silly little statements such as these are meaningless.

Both applied and basic research is drives the field forward.

[BuddyQ]

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Had medicine been always left up to the prerogative of government collectives, we would still be using leaches to cure 'the vapors.'
"And if the market believed they worked, they would still be sold. Come on, silly little statements such as these are meaningless."

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I think it is full of meaning.

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Both applied and basic research is drives the field forward.

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Yup, applied and basic research under competition in pursuit of profit in a free market does drive the market forward.

[tame_deuces]

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Both applied and basic research is drives the field forward.

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Yup, applied and basic research under competition in pursuit of profit in a free market does drive the market forward.

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Basic research in pursuit of profit? [img]/images/graemlins/confused.gif[/img]

That is close to being an oxymoron.

[ymu]

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Both applied and basic research is drives the field forward.

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Yup, applied and basic research under competition in pursuit of profit in a free market does drive the market forward.

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Basic research in pursuit of profit? [img]/images/graemlins/confused.gif[/img]

That is close to being an oxymoron.

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It depends how you measure "profit". Not everything is measured in financial terms - if it was there wouldn't be any scientists working for far less than a sales rep. The problem we have now is that the universities and other non-profit research groups doing that basic research are increasingly starved of public funding and are forced to do service work for industry, which is necessarily motivated by profit. This massively distorts research priorities away from genuine innovation and the public interest. More focus me-too drugs, palliative treatments for chronic illnesses and lifestyle interventions, less on treatments for rare diseases, simple affordable interventions and curative procedures (especially if the latter don't require drugs or medical devices).

This idea that innovation can only come from "competition" is another propaganda use of a complex word. It is definitely true that competition can and does drive innovation and improvement, but only when this is the only way to win. Competition itself is about beating the rest, not necessarily raising the bar to do so.

So, for example, in the UK we have Starbucks and PC World setting up loads of loss-leading retail outlets in a new area, starving the "competition" out and then closing most of their outlets once they have established a local monopoly. The supermarkets aren't allowed to build as many outlets as they would like, so they buy up the available land to prevent their competitors from moving in. This is certainly "competitive", but it leads to worse rather than better outcomes for individual consumers and the local area.

The enormous amount of money spent on advertising stuff we'd buy anyway surely demonstrates how vacuous this particular bit of propaganda is. A huge proportion of my monthly bills goes to pay ad men to ruin TV, the internet and the landscape in order to persuade me that I need to buy gas or food or soap powder. Gee, thanks for that; I'd never have got there on my own...

If you accept that "competition" within a "free" market is judged solely on who makes the most money, you must realise that it's ridiculous to suggest that this automatically drives standards up (VHS vs Betamax, anyone?). It so obviously doesn't act in this way, and it's easy to find examples of it being harmful, and you're gonna have a really hard time explaining why the key innovators have largely remained in the badly paid public sector if profit is the best motivator.